Preliminary Data Suggests Vita Loading Times Favor Retail Games

December 18, 2011
Written by Jonathan Leack

With Sony planning to deploy both physical and digital versions of PlayStation Vita games as consistently as possible, many consumers have shared their interest to choose downloading over carrying around cartridges. If you’re one of them, don’t make your mind up too hastily, as new data suggests that cartridges may have the upper hand.

Preliminary results found by Kotaku Japan have shown that loading times within the digital and physical versions of Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Army Corps of Hell are not equal. The discrepancy goes as far as four seconds, and in all cases has been in favor of the cartridge version of each game.

If this is true and affects all games, it would be a big departure from the PlayStation Portable where UMDs were always slower than digital copies or memory card installs. With the memory cards being so expensive, Sony’s claim that choosing a proprietary card to make “an even playing field” does seem flawed.

We have a PlayStation Vita in our office and we’ll test this as soon as possible and let you know what we find so you can make your decision long before the device lands on Western shores.